SOVIET SPACE PROBE USELESS

A Soviet space official said Friday that a ground control operator sent an incorrect message to a Soviet space probe bound for Mars, and the unmanned spacecraft is now worthless. "Only a miracle can save it," Roald Z. Sagdeyev, head of the Soviet Space Research Institute, said in an interview with the Associated Press. Earlier, the official Tass news agency announced that ground control had lost communications contact with the Phobos 1 probe, which is millions of miles from Earth and racing toward a rendezvous with the planet Mars.